Information Alliance
Counterpart Projects: German
The German contemporary authors project serves as an example of collaborative monograph acquisition. During their first meeting in 1998 German language and literature selectors discovered that while all three libraries held fairly extensive collections of the works of a core group of major contemporary German-language authors, none of the three libraries collected systematically beyond the top tier of best-known authors. From the discovery grew the idea of dividing a list of contemporary authors produced by German book vendor, Otto Harrassowitz. This comprehensive list contains over 1,400 living or recently deceased authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The sheer number of authors involved made it virtually impossible for any one of the IRIS libraries to collect exhaustively from the list.
The selectors realized that the chances of building a richer and more representative sampling of the authors would improve dramatically if collecting responsibility were divided among the three institutions. To this end, they conducted a through analysis of their library holdings of the writers. The results of this analysis will serve both as a point of departure and a baseline for measuring the interim progress and final outcome of the project. First, selectors created a spreadsheet listing all the contemporary authors on the Harrassowitz list. Next, OPAC searches showed which libraries held which authors. The OPAC search results also served to identify the 30-35 core authors that all three libraries had collected and would continue to collect. The IRIS holdings for these top authors were next compared to the titles in Verzeichnis lieferbarer Bücher, the German Books in Print, to evaluate the comprehensiveness of IRIS holdings of these authors.
From the OPAC searches, the German selectors generated a series of differentiated lists showing the number of titles held by each institution. Searches revealed that there were already collecting focal points at the respective libraries, and that some authors were collected extensively by just one of the three libraries. This helped determine which library should assume primary collecting responsibility for a particular author. A numeric code was assigned to each institution and the comprehensive list was then sorted by code to generate a list of authors for which each library would assume collecting responsibility. This list was manually adjusted to reflect existing collecting strengths. The German selectors at the respective IRIS libraries will carry out the project over the next three-to-five years.
The German contemporary authors project illustrates the major principles of developing a joint monograph collection. Each institution builds on existing strengths by collecting core materials. All three libraries will continue to collect the top 35 authors that form the core collection of modern German literature. Even within this core group, the option to rely on a partner library to collect selected authors exists, and thus provides greater flexibility in the use of funds at each institution. On the other hand, the distribution of collecting responsibility for specific authors not in the core group will yield a more diverse, richer joint collection as the economic burden of building a combined collection is spread over the German allocations of the three libraries.
